Mirror of our Sorrows

by Pierre Lemaitre

Genres: World War II; War & Military

Synopsis

"Tremendous and enjoyable" - La Libre Belgique
"A great success" - La Croix


April, 1940. Louise Belmont runs, naked, down the boulevard du Montparnasse. To understand the tragic scene she has just experienced, she will have to plunge into the madness of the 'Phoney War', when the whole of France, seized by the panic of a new World War, descends into chaos.

Alongside bistro-owner Monsieur Jules, new recruit Gabriel and small-time crook Raoul, Louise navigates this period of enormous upheaval and extraordinary twists of fate, for as the Nazi's advance, the threat of German occupation will uncover long-buried secrets and make strange bedfellows.

With his characteristic wit and verve, Pierre Lemaitre chronicles the greatness and decline of a people crushed by circumstance. In Mirror of Our Sorrows, the final novel in the Paris between-the-wars trilogy, is an incandescent tale that is both burlesque and tragic.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Release date: February 2, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 544

Sample

Those who thought the war would soon begin had long since grown weary, among them, Monsieur Jules. More than six months after the general mobilisation, the dispirited owner of La Petite Bohème café had ceased to believe that war would ever come. Indeed, as she worked her shift, Louise had even heard him remark “Truth be told, no-one ever really believed in this war”. According to Monsieur Jules, the whole thing was little more than a vast diplomatic wrangling spanning the whole of Europe, punctuated by bombastic patriotic speeches, thunderous announcements: a continental chess game in which the general mobilisation was no more than histrionic posturing. Granted, there had been a few deaths here and there – “More than they’ve reported, no doubt” – the skirmish in the Sarre in September had claimed the lives of two or three hundred men but, “I wouldn’t call that a war!” Monsieur Jules would say popping his head around the kitchen door. The gas masks that had arrived in autumn and now lay forgotten in some drawer had become the subject of ridicule in newspaper cartoons. People shuffled down to the air-raid shelters as if taking part in some pointless ritual; these were sirens without planes, and this was a war without battles that seemed to drag on interminably. The one thing that felt tangible was the enemy, the same sempiternal enemy the populace was vowing to exterminate for the third time in half a century, but an enemy that seemed no more inclined than they were to hurl itself into the fray. So much so that, by spring, the État-Major gave permission for soldiers at the front – here, Monsieur Jules would transfer his dish towel to his other hand and jab his finger at the heavens to underscore the enormity of the situation – to plant vegetable gardens! “I ask you . . . !” he would sigh heavily.

Little surprise then, that the opening of hostilities – though it took place in northern Europe and was too far away for his taste – rekindled his enthusiasm. He would say to anyone who cared to listen, “When you see the drubbing the Allies gave Hitler at the Battle of Narvik, you know this war isn’t going to last long,” and, considering the matter closed, he could return to his customary causes for complaint: inflation, press censorship, the days he did not get to have an aperitif, the pen-pushers with their cushy jobs, the authoritarian antics of tin-pot governors (particularly that old fogey de Froberville), the curfews, the price of coal – nothing found favour in his eyes, excepting the military strategy of Général Gamelin, which Monsieur Jules considered peerless.

“If they come for us, they’ll come through Belgium, that’s self-evident. And let me tell you, we’ll be waiting for them!”

Louise, who was carrying plates of poireaux vinaigrette and pieds paquet, overheard one diner muttering “Self-evident my backside . . .”

“For pity’s sake!” roared Monsieur Jules returning to his rightful place behind the bar once more, “Where else are they going to come from?”

He seized the wire egg holder on the bar and set it down.

“There! That’s the Ardennes: they’re impassable!”

With the wet dishrag he drew a sweeping curve on the bar.

“That’s the Maginot Line: also impassable! So, where else can they attack? The only possibility is Belgium.”

Then, his tactical demonstration complete, he withdrew to the kitchen, muttering under his breath.

“Bloody fool . . . You don’t need to be a général to work it out . . .”

Louise did not listen to the remainder of the conversation because her primary concern was not Monsieur Jules and his martial gesticulations, but the doctor.

This was how he had always been known; they had called him “the doctor” for twenty years, since he first began dining at the same table by the window every Saturday. He had never exchanged more than a handful of words with Louise: good day, good evening. He would arrive just before noon and settle himself with his newspaper. Though his invariable request was for the dessert of the day, every day Louise made it a point of honour to go over and take his order, uttered in a gentle, equable tone, “Clafoutis, oh yes,” he would say, “clafoutis sounds perfect.”

He would read his paper, stare out at the street, eat his dessert, drink a carafe of wine and, a little before two o’clock, as Louise was counting the money in the till, he would get to his feet, neatly fold his copy of Paris-Soir and leave it on the table, place a tip in the saucer, say his goodbyes and take his leave. Even the previous September, when the café-restaurant had been abuzz with news of the general mobilisation (Monsieur Jules had been so ebullient that one almost felt inclined to entrust him with running the État-Major), the doctor had not varied his routine one iota.

Then, suddenly, some weeks earlier, as Louise was setting down his crème brûlée à l’anis, he had smiled, leaned towards her, and made his proposition.

Had he suggested sleeping with her, Louise would have set down the dish, slapped him across the face, calmly returned to serving tables, and Monsieur Jules would have lost his longest-standing customer. But it had not been that. Yes, it had been a sexual proposition, but . . . how to put it . . .

“I would like to see you naked,” he said placidly. “Just once. Just to look at you, nothing more.”

Lost for words, Louise had not known how to respond; she had flushed crimson as though she were at fault, opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. The doctor had already resumed reading his newspaper, Louise wondered whether perhaps she had dreamed it.

She had spent the rest of her shift thinking about his proposition, vacillating between astonishment and anger, yet knowing that it was too late, that by rights she should have stood there with her hands on her hips and confronted him, shamed him in front of the other diners . . . She could feel black fury welling inside her. When a plate slipped from her fingers and shattered on the kitchen tiles, she snapped. She rushed back into the café.

The doctor had gone.

His folded newspaper lay on the empty table.

She snatched it up and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. “What on earth has got into you, Louise?” said Monsieur Jules, who considered the doctor’s copies of Paris-Soir and customers’ mislaid umbrellas to be the spoils of war.

He retrieved the newspaper, smoothed it out and stared at Louise perplexedly.

Louise had been an adolescent when she first began working the Saturday shift at La Petite Bohème and first encountered Monsieur Jules, sole proprietor and chief cook. He was a slow, heavyset man with a large nose, ears that sprouted thick tufts of hair and a salt-and-pepper walrus moustache. He invariably wore carpet slippers and a large black beret that completely covered his pate – no-one had ever seen him hatless. Every day, he cooked for some thirty diners – “Good honest Parisian food!” he would insist, jabbing an emphatic finger. The menu consisted of a single “plat du jour”. “Just like at home – if customers want a choice, they’ve only to cross the street.” What precisely Monsieur Jules did was shrouded in mystery. The clientele often wondered how this plump, slow-moving man who always seemed to be perched behind the bar somehow managed to cook so many meals of such high quality. The restaurant was always full; indeed, Monsieur Jules could have opened evenings and Sundays, even enlarged the dining room, but he always demurred. “If you open a door too wide, you never know who’ll come in,” he would say, then cryptically add: “Trust me, I know a thing or two . . .” The words would hang in the air like a prophecy.

Monsieur Jules had first asked Louise if she would help out in the restaurant the year that his wife, whom no-one now remembered, ran off with the son of the coal merchant from the rue Maracadet. What had begun as a favour for a neighbour carried on throughout Louise’s studies at Teacher Training College. On graduation, she found a post at the local primary school on the rue Damrémont and so had no reason to change her habits. Monsieur Jules paid her under the counter, usually rounding up to the nearest ten francs, though always gruffly, as though she had asked and he were doing so reluctantly.

Louise felt as though she had always known the doctor. Consequently, she might not have considered his desire to see her naked so immoral had he not watched her grow up. His request felt somehow incestuous. Moreover, she had only recently lost her mother. What kind of proposition was this to make to an orphan? In fact, Madame Belmont had been dead for seven months, and Louise had not worn mourning for six of those. She winced at the weakness of her own argument.

She wondered why an old man should want to see her naked. Undressing herself later that evening, she stood in front of the full-length bedroom mirror. At thirty, she had a flat stomach and a tender pubis downed with light brown hair. She turned sideways. She had never liked her breasts, which she thought too small, but she was proud of her arse. She had her mother’s oval face, with high cheekbones, shimmering blue eyes and a pretty, slightly pouting mouth. Paradoxically, it was her thick lips that people first noticed, although she was neither smiling nor talkative, and never had been, not even as a child. In the neighbourhood, locals attributed her solemnity to the hardships she had endured: her father had died in 1916, her uncle a year later, and her mother had suffered from depression and spent much of her life standing at the window staring out into the courtyard. The first man to look at her as though she were beautiful was a gueule cassée – a soldier who had fought in the Great War and lost half his face in a burst of shrapnel. Talk about a childhood.

Louise was a pretty girl, though she refused to admit it, even in her thoughts. “There are hundreds of prettier girls out there,” she told herself. She had many admirers, but “that doesn’t mean anything, all girls have admirers”. In her job as a teacher, she found herself constantly rebuffing overtures from colleagues and headmasters (and even the fathers of pupils) who would try to put a hand on her buttocks in the corridors, but that was hardly unusual, it happened everywhere. She had never lacked for suitors. Among them, Armand, who had courted her for five years. They were duly betrothed. Louise was not about to give her neighbours food for scandalmongering. Their wedding had been quite an affair. Madame Belmont had sagely allowed Armand’s mother to take care of all the arrangements: the ceremony, the reception, the toast, the sixty guests including Monsieur Jules who showed wearing black tie and tails (Louise later discovered he had rented his suit from a theatrical costumier, which explained why everything was too small, except for the trousers, which he had to constantly hike up) and patent leather pumps that made his feet look as small as those of a Chinese empress, Monsieur Jules who insisted on playing master of ceremonies on the pretext that he had closed the restaurant so they could hold the reception there. Louise did not care, she was eager to go to bed with Armand, to have his baby. A baby that never came.

The engagement had dragged on for some time. The neighbours did not understand. They had begun to eye the couple suspiciously. What couple courted for three years without marrying? It was unheard of. It was Armand who had insisted on the wedding, meanwhile Louise deferred her decision every month until she stopped having her period. Most young women prayed heaven they would not fall pregnant before their wedding day; for Louise the reverse was true: no baby, no wedding. But still no baby came.

In desperation, Louise made one last attempt. Since they could not have a child of their own, they would go and get one from the orphanage – there was no shortage of babies who needed love and care. Armand saw this as an insult to his manhood. “Why not take in the dog that roots through the dustbins?” he said, “He needs love and care too!” These conversations would get out of hand, it happened constantly, and they bickered like an old married couple. On the day the subject of adoption was raised, Armand angrily stalked out, went home and did not return.

Louise felt relieved, believing that he was at fault. What a scandal the break-up caused in the neighbourhood. “For heaven’s sake,” roared Monsieur Jules, “if the girl doesn’t want to marry, you can hardly force her into it!” But privately, he took Louise aside: “How old are you, Louise? Your Armand is a fine, upstanding young man, what more do you want?”, then, in hushed, faltering tones, “A baby? A baby? The baby will come when it’s ready, these things take time!” and he would retreat to his kitchen “. . . my bechamel sauce will be curdled, that’s all I need . . .”

What Louise missed most about Armand was the baby she never gave him. And what, until that moment, had been an unmet desire slowly became an obsession. Louise longed for a child at all costs, at any price, even if it meant her ruin. She felt her heart break at the sight of a newborn in a perambulator. She cursed herself, reviled herself; she would wake with a start in the early hours, convinced she could hear a baby crying, scramble out of bed, bumping into the furniture, run down the corridor and open the door and her mother would say “It’s just a dream, Louise,” take her daughter in her arms and lead her back to bed as though she were a little girl.

The house was mournful as a graveyard. At first, she locked up the room she had planned to transform into a nursery. Later she would creep in on the sly and sleep on the floor with only a thin blanket, though her mother was not taken in.

Troubled by her daughter’s fixation, Madame Belmont would hold her, stroke her hair, tell her she understood, that there was more to life than having babies – an easy thing for her to say, since she had one.

“I know it’s not fair,” Jeanne Belmont would say, “but maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell you that you should first find a father for your baby . . .”

It was a fatuous statement: Mother Nature, all that drivel that had infuriated her at school . . .

“Yes, yes, I know it upsets you. What I’m trying to say is . . . Sometimes it’s better to do things the right way round, that’s all. Find the right man, and then . . .”

“I had a man!”

“Well, clearly he was not the right man.”

And so, Louise took lovers. In secret. She slept with men from far-flung neighbourhoods, men from her school. If a man on the omnibus gave her the glad eye, she would respond as discreetly as morality allowed. Two days later, she would close her eyes, stare at the cracks in the ceiling, make little moans, then spend the next weeks waiting for her period to start. “I don’t care how he behaves,” she said to herself, thinking about her unborn child, as though accepting some future ordeal might hasten its arrival. This was a chronic madness, she knew it, yet it haunted her.

She began to go to church, light votive candles, confess imagined sins so that she might receive absolution. She dreamed of suckling a child. When lovers pressed their lips to her breast, she would weep; she longed to lash out at every one of them. She rescued a stray kitten, relishing the fact that it was filthy; she spent her days brushing, scouring, washing the animal as the cat quickly grew fat and needy, just what she needed to expiate the fault she felt she had committed by being barren. Jeanne Belmont said the cat was a catastrophe, but did nothing to deter its presence.

Wearied by her doomed attempts to conceive, Louise decided to consult a doctor. The verdict was categorical, she could not bear a child, a problem with her tubes, the result of several bouts of salpingitis, there was nothing to be done. As if in sympathy, that same night, the cat was run over outside La Petite Bohème. Good riddance, said Monsieur Jules.

Louise foreswore the company of men; she became surly and ill-tempered. At night, she would pound her head against the wall, she began to despise herself. When she looked at herself in the glass, she saw the imperceptible tics, that pinched, tense, prickly expression common to those women consumed by the disappointment of not having children. While some women she knew – her colleague Edmonde, or Madame Croizet who ran the tobacconist’s – blithely accepted being childless. But for Louise, not being a mother felt like a humiliation.

Men were frightened by her repressed pent-up anger. Even café regulars, who had often taken serious liberties, no longer dared brush up against her as she moved between the tables. She seemed cold and distant. At school, she was nicknamed the “Mona Lisa”, and it was not kindly meant. She had her hair cropped short to punish her femininity and appear more distant still. Ironically, the severe haircut succeeded only in making her look prettier. Sometimes, she feared she might take a dislike to her pupils, would end up like Madame Guénot, who would force timid boys to come to the front of the class where she would beat them and who, during playtime, would make naughty girls stand in the corner of the yard for so long they sometimes peed themselves.

These memories flooded back to Louise as she stood naked in front of the glass. Perhaps because her relations with men were non-existent nowadays, she decided that, immoral though it might be, she felt flattered by the doctor’s proposition.

Nonetheless, she had felt relieved the following Saturday when the doctor, doubtless realising the impropriety of his proposal, made no further mention of it. He smiled gently, thanked her for the carafe of wine and, as was his wont, engrossed himself in Paris-Soir. Louise, who had never paid the man much heed, made the most of his absorption to study him. If she had not instantly dismissed his proposition a week earlier, it was because there was nothing louche or unsettling about the doctor. His face was lined and haggard. She reckoned him to be about seventy, though she had little talent for such conjectures and was often mistaken. Much later, she would remember she had thought there was something Etruscan about his features. At the time, she had been struck by the word, since it was one she had never used. What she had actually meant was “Roman” because of his aquiline nose.

Meanwhile, Monsieur Jules, excited by rumours that communist propaganda would soon be punishable by death, suggested broadening the criteria (“If it was down to me, I’d have all the lawyers guillotined . . . I mean, wouldn’t you?”). Louise was serving an adjacent table when the doctor got to his feet to leave.

“I would pay you, obviously, you need only tell me how much. And, to be clear, I only wish to look at you, nothing more, you need have no fear.”

He buttoned his overcoat, donned his hat, smiled and walked out, giving a little wave to Monsieur Jules, who was now railing against Maurice Thorez (“He should be deported to Moscow, the animal. Or put in front of a firing squad!”). Caught unawares by the doctor’s renewed suggestion, Louise almost dropped her tray. Monsieur Jules looked up.

“Are you alright, Louise?”

In the week that followed, she felt a black fury once again well up inside her; she would tell the old fart exactly what she thought of him. She waited impatiently for Saturday, but when she saw the doctor come through the door, he looked so old, so frail . . . As she went to serve him, she racked her brain to understand why her fury had so suddenly abated. It was because he was so self-assured. While she had been unsettled by his proposition, he seemed quietly confident that she would accept. The doctor smiled, ordered the dish of the day, read his newspaper, ate his lunch, paid his bill and, as he was about to leave:

“Have you considered the matter?” he said in a low voice. “How much do you want?”

Louise glanced at Monsieur Jules and felt a wave of shame that she was engaging in a whispered conversation with the doctor.

“Ten thousand francs.” She spat the words, like an insult.

She blushed. The sum was exorbitant, unacceptable.

He nodded as though to say, I understand. Then buttoned his greatcoat and put on his hat.

“Agreed.”

Then he walked out.

*

“You’re not angry with the doctor, are you?” said Monsieur Jules.

“No. Why do you ask?”

A vague gesture. Nothing, nothing.

The sheer enormity of the sum was frightening. As Louise finished her shift, she tried to make a list of all the things that she could buy with ten thousand francs. She realised that she was prepared to allow this man to pay to see her naked. She was a whore. The thought appealed to her. It aligned with the image she had of herself. At other moments, she tried to reassure herself, reasoning that to reveal her nakedness was no different to visiting a doctor. One of her fellow waitresses, who posed for an art academy, confided that the only drawback was boredom, and the fear of catching a chill.

Then there were the ten thousand francs . . . No, it was ridiculous, the money must involve something more than taking off her clothes. For that price, he could insist . . . But Louise could not think of anything that a man might demand for such a sum.

Perhaps the doctor had had the same thought, because he no longer raised the subject. One Saturday passed. And another. And a third. Louise wondered whether she had asked for too much, whether he had sought out a more accommodating woman. She was fractious. She found herself setting his plate down a little brusquely, giving a little grunt whenever he addressed her, in short becoming the kind of waitress she would have loathed had she been the customer.

She had almost finished her shift. She was wiping down the doctor’s table. Through the window, she could see her little house in the impasse Pers. She saw the doctor standing on the street corner, smoking a cigarette, the very image of a man waiting patiently.

She lingered for as long as possible, but regardless of the time one takes, sooner or later the task is done. She slipped on her coat and left. She vaguely hoped that the doctor might tire of waiting, but she knew that he would not.

She walked up to him. He smiled gently. He looked shorter than he did in the restaurant.

“Where would you like to do this, Louise? Your place? Or mine?”

There could be no question of going to his home, it was too risky.

Nor of inviting him into hers – what would the neighbours think? Not that she had many neighbours, but it was a matter of principle.

He suggested an hotel. It sounded like a bordello. She agreed.

He had clearly anticipated her response, because he gave her a slip of paper.

“Friday, if that is convenient? At about six o’clock? The room will be booked under the name Thirion, I’ve noted it on the paper.”

He slipped his hands into his pockets.

“Thank you for agreeing to this,” he said.

Louise stared at the scrap of paper in her hand, stuffed it into her back pocket and went home.

*

The whole week was an ordeal.

Would she go, would she not? She changed her mind ten times a day and twenty times a night. What if, after all, things turned sour? The place they were due to meet was in the fourteenth arrondissement, the Hôtel Aragon, so on Thursday evening she went there to survey the landscape. She was standing outside when the sirens began to wail – an air raid. She glanced around for somewhere she might shelter.

“Come with me . . .”

As the irritable guests emerged reluctantly from the hotel in single file, an elderly woman took Louise by the arm: it’s just next door. A stairwell led down to the cellars. Candles were lit. No-one seemed surprised that Louise did not have a gas mask slung over her shoulder; barely half the residents had one. The hotel clearly had long-term residents, since the guests all knew each other. At first, they stared at Louise, but then a man with a pot belly that spilled over his belt took out a pack of cards, a young couple produced a checkerboard, and they lost interest in her. Only the hotel manager, a birdlike woman of uncertain age, with hair the doubtful coal-black of a wig, steel-grey eyes, and a mantilla wrapped about her skeletal frame – when she sat down, Louise noticed the bony knees beneath her dress – only the manager continued to stare at her, obviously unaccustomed to seeing new faces. The air raid was short-lived, and the assembled company trooped upstairs. “Ladies first!” said the fat man, and it was clear that he said this every time and in doing so felt like a gentleman. No-one had said a word to Louise. She thanked the hotel manager who watched her walk away; Louise could feel eyes burning into her, but when she turned, the street was empty.

*

The following day, the hours flew past. Louise had decided that she would not go, but after coming back from school, she had changed her clothes. And at 5.30 p.m., with fear gnawing at her belly, she left her house.

Barely had she stepped outside than she turned back, went into the kitchen, took a steak knife from the drawer and slipped it into her handbag.

When she approached the reception desk, the manager recognised her and her surprise was evident.

“Thirion,” Louise said simply.

The elderly woman handed her a key and gestured to the staircase.

“Room 311. Third floor.”

Louise felt the urge to vomit.

The place was calm and silent. Louise had never ventured into a hotel, it was not the sort of place the Belmont family frequented; hotels were for the rich, or at least for other people, for those who took holidays and lived on fresh air. The very word “hotel” was exotic, synonymous with “palace”, or, when uttered in a certain tone, a synonym for “brothel”, two places where no-one in the Belmont family had ever set foot. But now, Louise was here. The hallway carpet was threadbare but clean. Breathless from climbing the stairs, Louise stood outside the door for a long moment, summoning the courage to knock. There came a noise from somewhere and, affrighted, she grabbed the handle, turned it, and stepped into the room.

The doctor was sitting on the bed wearing his overcoat, as though in a waiting room. He was perfectly calm. He looked terribly old, and Louise realised that she would have no need of the knife.

“Good evening, Louise.”

His voice was soft. The lump in her throat made it impossible for Louise to reply.

The room comprised a bed, a small table, a chair and a commode on which lay a thick envelope. The doctor allowed a benevolent smile to play on his lips, he tilted his head slightly as though to soothe her, but Louise was not afraid.

On her way here, she had made a number of decisions. Firstly, she planned to tell him that she would do only what had been agreed, on no account could he touch her; if that was his intention, she would leave straight away. Next, she would count the money; she had no intention of being short-changed . . . But now, standing in the cramped little room, she realised that her plans were irrelevant, that everything would play out simply and calmly.

She casually shifted her weight from one foot to the other, glanced at the envelope as though to marshal her courage, took off her coat and hung it on the hook on the back of the door, slipped off her shoes and, after a momentary hesitation, crossed her hands and pulled her dress over her head.

She would have liked him to help, to tell her what to do. The room was filled with an obscure, humming silence. For a second, she thought that she might faint. If she were indisposed, would he take advantage?

She was standing and he was seated, but her position afforded no advantage. His strength lay in his stillness.

He simply looked at her and waited.

Although it was she who had stripped to her underwear, it was the doctor, hands stuffed into the pockets of his greatcoat, who seemed cold.

To calm herself, she scanned his face for the familiar features of the customer she knew, but she did not find them.

After a momentary awkwardness, and because she had to do something, she reached behind her and unfastened her brassiere.

The man’s gaze moved to her bosom, as though drawn by the light, and though there was not a flicker of movement, she thought she perceived some sort of emotion in his expression. She looked down at her breasts, at the pink areolae, it was faintly distressing.

She wanted this to be over. So she steeled herself, peeled off her drawers and stood with her hands behind her back.

Slowly, like a gentle caress, the old man’s eyes moved down her body and stopped at her groin. Long seconds passed. It was impossible to tell what he was feeling. His face and his whole being were consumed by some emotion that was ineffable and infinitely sad.

Instinctively, she knew that she should turn around. Although perhaps she merely wanted to avoid this confrontation that was almost heart-wrenching.

She pirouetted on her left foot and stared at the nautical engraving that hung, slightly askew, on the wall above the chiffonier. She could almost feel his eye on her buttocks.

She felt a fleeting qualm, feared he might reach out to touch her, and whirled around again.

He had just taken a pistol from his pocket and shot himself in the head.

*

Louise was found naked, huddled on the floor, prostrate, her whole body trembling; meanwhile on the bed, the old man lay on his side, his feet dangling inches above the